The Dickens Circle (Classic Reprint) [Paperback]

From the time when, as a very raw youth, I first came to know anything about Charles Dickens, I have been attracted by the magnetic personality of the man himself even more than by the men and women he created. The outstanding impression that I gained from my first reading of Forster s Life of Charles Dickens was of this magnetism of his personality which attracted to him so many of the most brilliant men and women of the time, and won for him their wholehearted friendship. That impression was deepened as I read more widely. Youth, of course, discovers wonders continually which it is amazed to find are already well known to its parents, but the amazement in my case arose out of the fact that this very striking phase of Dickens scharacter this extraordinary capacity of his for friendship had not apparently been discovered. At any rate, it had never been adequately dealt with. I was struck by the fact that this man Dickens, comparatively unlettered as he was, who had had no material advantages in life, but, on the contrary, many disadvantages, should not merely have come to know so many of his peers that was inevitable but should have so won their affection; should have been so loved by old men like Landor and Leigh Hunt, and Jeffrey, by men of his own age like Forster, and Maclise, and Talfourd, and by men of a younger generation like Percy Fitzgerald, James Payn and Charles Kent; should have been accepted by them all as the sun of their firmament. If it be true that the proper study for mankind is Man, it is equally true that men most reveal themselves in their relations with men. In my desire to gain a true notion as to what manner of man Dickens really was, I found Forster sbook
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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